拍品專文
That David Smith considered himself neither sculptor nor painter is commonly acknowledged in historical overviews of the artists' triumphant career. "I belong with painters in a sense; and all my early friends were painters because we all studied together... Painting and sculpture aren't very far apart," he is quoted as saying (David Smith: Sprays from Bolton Landing, exh. cat., Anthony d'Offay, London, 1985 p. 2). To the artist, paintings were not merely an outlet to diffuse the pressure valve of his blacksmithing studio, nor were they sketches for sculptures. Encompassing the same concerns (formal, and mythic) of his sculptures, his works on canvas were simply a different means of expressing them.
Formally, Smith's central pursuit was reconciling the optical precepts of painted abstraction with volumetric forms, holding content at a triple remove. While his sculptures translate the modern canvas's content to three-dimensions, his paintings and drawings are an inversion of this process, returning objects of the world to the flat plane of vision from which they are initially perceived. Tackling this, Smith was at his most inventive with his spray series, which he began at his studio at Bolton Landing in 1957 and would sustain until the early 1960s. The period would mark the beginning of Smith's canonization as an artist, coinciding with his major retrospective David Smith at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957, and his selection as the American representative at the 29th Venice Bienniale in 1958.
Working additively, Smith made stencils of found objects, layering sprays of enamel paint over a changing arrangement flotsam from his studio; die-cute forms, tools in disuse, and natural elements. Shapes vibrating against one another, the dynamic compositions that result, hold much in common with the photocollages of the surrealists, specifically the photo-sensitive "Rayograms" patented by Man Ray. Photocollage was a form Smith had experimented with in his youth, and the artist embraced a method that left aspects of the final composition to chance.
The aerial perspective, meanwhile, becomes an equalizer, eliminating, as the primitive drawings of Lescaux did, the hierarchies that light and gravity give to objects in space. Smith's early still-life photographs were composed in this manner, and Smith's fascination with the condensing effects of the omniscent view spurred the following comment, "today the landscape may be viewed on a cross country journey from a plane three miles up. Looking down there is no space. The solid earth, its rocks and hills become and endless flat plane" (D. Smith, notes (ca. 1950) in Gray, ed., David Smith, p. 71).
Given the physical evidence of a spray can's pressure, fading out at the edges of each form, our eye assumes that the positives were once in this world and we expect to apprehend what scraps were used to achieve a composition like Untitled. Ultimately none are identifiable. Like the figures in Plato's cave, the blurred mystery of each shape promises an ideal as yet determined. Sharing Gottlieb's impulse to 'primitivism' the cryptic shapes are apiece with Smith's missive of abstraction as a formal strategy to animate common objects with myth that is expressed so elegantly here.
Formally, Smith's central pursuit was reconciling the optical precepts of painted abstraction with volumetric forms, holding content at a triple remove. While his sculptures translate the modern canvas's content to three-dimensions, his paintings and drawings are an inversion of this process, returning objects of the world to the flat plane of vision from which they are initially perceived. Tackling this, Smith was at his most inventive with his spray series, which he began at his studio at Bolton Landing in 1957 and would sustain until the early 1960s. The period would mark the beginning of Smith's canonization as an artist, coinciding with his major retrospective David Smith at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957, and his selection as the American representative at the 29th Venice Bienniale in 1958.
Working additively, Smith made stencils of found objects, layering sprays of enamel paint over a changing arrangement flotsam from his studio; die-cute forms, tools in disuse, and natural elements. Shapes vibrating against one another, the dynamic compositions that result, hold much in common with the photocollages of the surrealists, specifically the photo-sensitive "Rayograms" patented by Man Ray. Photocollage was a form Smith had experimented with in his youth, and the artist embraced a method that left aspects of the final composition to chance.
The aerial perspective, meanwhile, becomes an equalizer, eliminating, as the primitive drawings of Lescaux did, the hierarchies that light and gravity give to objects in space. Smith's early still-life photographs were composed in this manner, and Smith's fascination with the condensing effects of the omniscent view spurred the following comment, "today the landscape may be viewed on a cross country journey from a plane three miles up. Looking down there is no space. The solid earth, its rocks and hills become and endless flat plane" (D. Smith, notes (ca. 1950) in Gray, ed., David Smith, p. 71).
Given the physical evidence of a spray can's pressure, fading out at the edges of each form, our eye assumes that the positives were once in this world and we expect to apprehend what scraps were used to achieve a composition like Untitled. Ultimately none are identifiable. Like the figures in Plato's cave, the blurred mystery of each shape promises an ideal as yet determined. Sharing Gottlieb's impulse to 'primitivism' the cryptic shapes are apiece with Smith's missive of abstraction as a formal strategy to animate common objects with myth that is expressed so elegantly here.